That happened to my sister once, back in mexico, except it was on the toilet. She tried waking my dad to tell him there was a spider on the toilet & he just told her, in his sleepy haze, to just brush it into the water and flush it. Next morning he realized just how big the spider was.

Yeah, my cousin just posted a picture of almost the exact same spider - same size, coloration, sex - from her bathroom. She's in Queensland somewhere, not sure exactly where. We call them Harveys, as in Harvey Wallhanger. Harveys in Sydney tend to be more reddish and hairier, and not usually quite that big. Everything grows better in the tropics I guess. I usually tolerate them pretty well but when we were up at the farm in summer one walked over my eldest son's face while he was sleeping, then another jumped into my hair while I was driving, so when a third ran up my leg while I was watching TV I killed it stone dead. I'd had enough.

A friend of mine in the NRMA told me they cause a lot of car accidents due to their habit of sneaking into vehicles and hiding under the sun visor, then dropping into the driver's lap when the visor is pulled down.

Aw, shit. Well, it was the first page article, so I guess it's not surprising that someone fixed it. Someone had gone through and replaced every instance of the title character with the words "my dick." Sophomoric, yes, but it resulting it such wonderful passages as:

"In the earliest full narrative, when Indra comes disguised as her husband, my dick sees through his disguise but nevertheless accepts his advances."

"My dick emerges from her stone form, after being touched by Rama's foot."

"The author regards my dick as an independent woman who makes her own decisions, takes risks and is driven by curiosity to experiment with the extraordinary and then accept the curse imposed on her by patriarchal society."

@Greasemonkey - yeah that's pretty well exactly what happened to me. I screamed like a little girl and threw the spider out the window, but I didn't crash. My son, who had been ice-cool in his own spider-head incident the previous night, did me the courtesy of not laughing.

Yeah, we fish a few of those out of the pool at the farm every summer too. They do drown eventually. I've got a pic here somewhere from January this year, three in the same net. Water spiders are more common though. The paddocks are full of them and they go hunting on the pool surface but get sucked in by the filter overnight. Harveys are pretty harmless, true, but the fangs are big enough so that the bite stings. Also, having them in your hair just sucks, especially if you're driving an ancient Kombi with dodgy steering along the unfenced edge of a 50 metre drop at the time. But yes, I'm a bit of a princess by comparison to my stoic firstborn. It's a fair cop, yer honner.

My friend Andy used to collect funnelwebs with his bare hands. He's a gentle fellow, not a macho dickhead at all, and academically quite brilliant, just totally lacks common sense when it comes to arachnids. I think he might have given up though since the African Bird Eating Spider got loose in his flat. I don't think his wife was well pleased.

This guy wins the basket though. When we were in art school together he woke up itchy one morning, found he had rolled over and squashed a funnelweb in his bed in the night. Also, apropos of nothing, it's worth checking out his work. His photography is brilliant and so is his songwriting.